From the post:<p><i>Since emojis often bear graphic resemblances to our real faces, the understanding has often been that there would be no problems in interpreting them, and that the sender and the recipient would agree on such interpretation.</i><p>As someone fairly immersed in the emoji community, this is a strawman argument (i.e., no one really tries to argue this).<p>People love and use emoji not in spite of their ambiguity but rather because of it.<p>Even Unicode encourages emoji to have multiple meanings:<p><a href="http://unicode.org/emoji/selection.html" rel="nofollow">http://unicode.org/emoji/selection.html</a><p><i>Does the candidate emoji have notable metaphorical references or symbolism?</i><p>And from their FAQ:<p><a href="http://www.unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html</a><p><i>Do emoji characters have single semantics?<p>A: No. Because emoji characters are treated as pictographs, they are encoded in Unicode based primarily on their general appearance, not on an intended semantic.</i><p>Many people <i>want</i> to think there are some folks out there like myself who are seriously arguing Emoji are a language, but this isn't really true. And I say that as the author of a book called "How to Speak Emoji". The thing is, it's a humor book designed to be sold in Urban Outfitters. It's not a real language guide.<p>If you're curious about more nuanced takes on how emoji are actually being used, here are some good resources:<p>Tyler Schnoebelen's talk at Emojicon: <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/TylerSchnoebelen/emoji-linguistics" rel="nofollow">http://www.slideshare.net/TylerSchnoebelen/emoji-linguistics</a><p>Gretchen McCulloch on how Emoji aren't really threatening English:
<a href="http://the-toast.net/2016/06/29/a-linguist-explains-emoji-and-what-language-death-actually-looks-like/" rel="nofollow">http://the-toast.net/2016/06/29/a-linguist-explains-emoji-an...</a><p>The tl;dr: journalists / bloggers would love to get someone to argue that emoji are a language so they can "Well, actually" them, but the truth is this isn't really happening much.<p>However, some of us are deeply curious about whether our usage of emoji are evolving language-like characteristics and grammars. See this recent research on whether emoji have their own syntax:<p><a href="https://makingnoiseandhearingthings.com/2016/12/07/do-emojis-have-their-own-syntax/" rel="nofollow">https://makingnoiseandhearingthings.com/2016/12/07/do-emojis...</a><p>Note that a distinct syntax is probably necessary but not sufficient for emoji to be considered a language.